Tess of the d'Urbervilles eBook

The night was as sultry as the day. There was
no coolness after dark unless on the grass.
Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the barton-walls
were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime temperature
into the noctambulist’s face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew
not what to think of himself. Feeling had indeed
smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the
twain had kept apart. She seemed stilled, almost
alarmed, at what had occurred, while the novelty,
unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted
him—­palpitating, contemplative being that
he was. He could hardly realize their true relations
to each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing
should be before third parties thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea
that his temporary existence here was to be the merest
episode in his life, soon passed through and early
forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as
from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing
world without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman—­

Crowds of men and women attired in the
usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!—­

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew.
But behold, the absorbing scene had been imported
hither. What had been the engrossing world had
dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while
here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place,
novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never,
for him, started up elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could
hear across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring
household. The dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant,
so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that
he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance
to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever
in the landscape; what was it now? The aged
and lichened brick gables breathed forth “Stay!”
The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned,
the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality
within it was so far-reaching in her influence as
to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole
overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.
Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid’s.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter
the life of the obscure dairy had become to him.
And though new love was to be held partly responsible
for this, it was not solely so. Many besides
Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not
as to their external displacements, but as to their
subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant
leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the
pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found
that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here
as elsewhere.